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A little bit of history: cash railways (not the usual type of railway I post about)

I’d been told this segment was coming up on Coxy’s Big Break, and it finally aired on Sunday: a look at the cash railways at the shop I worked at part-time as a teenager, Hattams in Elsternwick.

Apparently these are some of the few still working cash railways in Victoria. They were common in medium to larger shops early last century, as a way for money to be relayed to a central cashier, and change sent back.

Completely unrelated: The Age has an article today about new Myki gates being no faster than the hybrid Metcard/Myki “frankenbarriers” they replaced. This is based on this great blog post from earlier in the week by Marcus Wong. Well worth a read.

Cooool. There was one in an antiques store somewhere on the New England tablelenads near Armidale (NSW) in the mid 1990s but I don’t know if it was functional.

Good work Marcus.

And I can personally confirm that the TfL barriers (Oyster card) are much, MUCH quicker than Myki or frankenbarriers. No hard data but just back from London with a lot of tube use they seemed to take about 1.5s per person, most of that walking through rather than reading/processing the card. I worked it out by counting 2 people every 3 seconds, consistently. Pretty much as soon as the gate started to open the reader was ready for the next person, and confirmed the reading in less than half a second. You really don’t have to pause at all.